Archives for October, 2009

It’s that time again. Here’s this week’s mystery campus: And the hint: Where cellular alchemy began. If you know the answer, or just want to take a cheap shot at Willie the Wildcat and his posse, leave it in the comment section.

Well this week the University of Toronto hosts the 50th anniversary of the Gairdner Foundation. If the Nobels are the Oscars of science, and the Lasker Awards the Golden Globes, this event is akin to the 50th anniversary of some big Hollywood studio. There are talks by many of today’s hottest science rock stars and…

Today I used a pipette for the first time in three and a half months. What a strange feeling it is to work in one’s own lab. While I’ve been submitting papers and grants, my technician has been busy preparing solutions, ordering equipment and even performing a few “experiments” (if you can call transforming bacteria…

Go and check ’em out. 4th place – James E. Hayden, Anglerfish ovary (4X) For more visit http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/ This year’s event even got covered in the New York Times. And if you want to enter into next year’s competition the deadline for entries: April 30, 2010. Get clicking.

This weekend, I had the opportunity to sit down with a friend, a cancer surgeon who works at a major teaching hospital in the US. He, his wife and two kids were up visiting us for the weekend. Over coffee, I was asking him about the state of cancer therapeutics. Although he himself does not…

Well this year was a big year again for RNA at the Nobels. Both prizes were essentially given to RNA dependent processes. In the case of Telomerase, an RNA molecule, Telomerase RNA (hTR or TERC), acts as the template strand to help Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase (TERT) elongate the end of the telomere. Here’s a great…

So more than a week has gone by and there has been little press about the science Nobels. And I must say that this year’s Medicine and Chemistry prizes are some of the most important in quite a while. But even between the two, the Chemistry is especially important. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe they…

Unraveling the ribosome is one of science’s Holy Grails. Were God a molecule, he or she would be a ribosome, a veritable galaxy of atoms whose job is to translate genetic code into the stuff of life–protein. – Brian Maffly, reporter for the Slt Lake Tribune in a recent article, Ramakrishnan: Nobel-winning work started in…

So we got back yesterday from our trip and we are in the post-traveling cleanup mode – Cleaning up the apartment, the fridge, and the email box. In fact I just received an email from one Coimbra student filled with photos from the past week. Below the fold are some pictures of our trip +…